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A bank robber who shot and killed a Baker County deputy on the side of the road 48 years ago has died in prison.

Calvin Carlos Campbell, 74, died Monday of natural causes at Gulf Correctional Institution in Florida’s Panhandle, according to the Department of Corrections.

On Jan. 11, 1966, the 26-year-old Yulee man barrelled out of Kingsland after robbing a bank in Georgia and fleeing in a rental car, according to a Times-Union account at the time. An estimated 100 officers from Florida and Georgia joined the pursuit into Florida where Campbell wrecked the car on County Road 121 near the state line.

Baker County Deputy Morris Fish, 36, was pursuing in the chase that reached speeds estimated at 125 mph and higher when Campbell crashed. Fish got out of his patrol car and managed to get a handcuff on one of Campbell’s wrists when a struggle started.

The deputy was shot twice with his own gun. A third shot blew the handcuff off Campbell’s wrist.

Friday, Susan Wallace said her uncle was killed before she was born. A once-wounded Korean war veteran, he was still carrying shrapnel in his body when he became a deputy.

“It’s been really hard on the family,” she said. “The whole family was close. There were eight children.”

Fish was divorced and had two daughters and a son when he died.

After killing Fish, Campbell fled north in the deputy’s patrol car but was stopped at a roadblock.

Campbell was on parole from a three-year federal sentence on a charge of transporting stolen checks the day he killed Fish. He had been sentenced in North Carolina and was serving the time at a prison in Tallahassee when he was let out that March. He skipped out on parole and was being sought by the FBI.

Baker Sheriff Joey Dobson was a senior in high school during the trial. It started in Macclenny but was moved to Union County out of fear that Campbell would not get a fair trial. Dobson said Baker County was a different place then. Back then there would have been only three or four deputies, he said.

Dobson said he missed school to go to the trial in Lake Butler.

“I remember sitting in the courtroom the day they brought the verdict in,” he said.

Campbell was sentenced to death. In a courtroom outburst he said he would never be executed.

“I’ll kill myself first,” he told the court.

Dobson, who was elected sheriff in 1996, created the Morris Fish Award when he took office. It is given annually to the Baker County deputy of the year. Fish’s name has also been added to the memorial wall for fallen officers in Washington.

Campbell’s sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972 when the U.S. Supreme Court banned the death penalty over how it was being administered, according to a Times-Union account.

Prison records show Campbell was paroled in 1986. No reason was given for the release. “It was extremely unsettling,” Wallace said. “Nobody in the family found out until after he was let out.”

Campbell was back in prison in 1988 after his arrest in West Palm Beach on two counts of lewd and lascivious acts on a child and other charges of fondling a child.

Wallace said the family has attended parole hearings over the years, first at two-year intervals, then each five years. The last was about four years ago.

I'm against the death penalty but this MFer should have spent his entire life behind bars after murdering Deputy Fish. All whom were responsible for letting him out of prison to molest those kids should be in prison themselves.

This guy killed a law-enforcement officer, and was paroled only twenty years later. So much for the "respect and honor" given to law enforcement officers. He started out with a death sentence, later commuted to "life", which somehow became twenty years. That sort of thing is what causes proponents of the death penalty to distrust the idea of "life" sentences.